Offline Update of Windows Azure Pack and 3rd Party Components

Recently I needed to update a Windows Azure Pack installation from RTM to Update 2. Because the servers had no Internet access, I needed an offline approach.

One way is to download the Windows Azure Pack 2013 Update 2 components, extract the files and install them one by one, thereby carefully checking that only the installed components are updated. It is very easy to make a mistake and add unwanted ones on a WAP portal server.

Components

Because this approach only works for the WAP 2013 Update 2 components and doesn’t give you the partner components such as Gridpro and Cloud Cruiser, the offline Web Platform Installer approach is the best choice. In fact WebPI has been upgraded from version 4.6 to 5.0 containing Update 2 plus the 3rd party components.

By choosing the /Offline and /Products:”WAP_SingleMachineInstallation” it downloads all components to the directory specified in /Path using the new XML for version 5.0

After a short while your destination directory is populated with a large number of components and prerequisites.

Preparation

Before you start updating the WAP components, please read the instructions carefully or you might end up in a state of no return. So take a Hyper-V checkpoint of your VMs or take a full backup. It is also a good idea to take a printscreen of the currently installed versions of the Windows Azure Pack and 3rd party components including their versions.

This will tell you which components to upgrade but be careful, there are a few things you have to take into account. First Create a backup of the Usage Collector Site and Application Pool settings by running the following two appcmd commands:

%systemroot%\system32\inetsrv\appcmd.exe set site MgmtSvc-UsageCollector /name:MgmtSvc-UsageCollector.backup %systemroot%\system32\inetsrv\appcmd.exe set config /section:applicationPools /[name=’MgmtSvc-UsageCollector’].name:MgmtSvc-UsageCollector.backup

Important: Plan downtime for your WAP admins and tenants because currently Microsoft does not support a rolling upgrade (if you have load balanced portals).